A table-full of people studied each other with a mixture of wariness and consternation.  Four family members, two social workers, four lawyers.  Each of us struggled to find solutions to a sixteen-year-old runaway whose eighteen-month old son would one day wonder about her choices.

Is that what love looks like?

The cousin who has taken the child into her home blurts out that when the boy turns three or four, she intends to tell him that his mother did not love him.  I gasp.  As her attorney, I cannot let her rights be carelessly tossed on a courtroom floor but the attitude of her son’s placement provider factors more into the humane considerations of the situation.  I think about my nieces and nephews who were adopted into our family.  I harken back to my foster parent training regarding honest, gentle, age-appropriate conversations with our foster children about their birth parents.  I think of my own son, who has never met his father, and the care that I have taken for 24 years never to speak  ill of the man at all, let alone in Patrick’s presence or hearing.

Is that what love looks like?

I hear a story on NPR about a new show called “The Slap”, apparently about the virtues of corporal punishment.  I contemplate the decisions of people who supposedly consider the feelings of others, and the timing of their actions.  I ruminate over gut-punches, empty mailboxes, phones which don’t ring, children standing in front of school buildings gazing on empty driveways.

Is that what love looks like?

I have loved five men, seven siblings, one birth child, four stepchildren, four babies who never made it, two parents, a half-dozen “second sons”, several borrowed daughters, and a dozen or more gal-pals.  The love of each differed from the love of every other.  But all of the love stayed with me to the point that sometimes I am completely overwhelmed with worry that I have failed even one of them, while at other times I fall to my knees in gratitude at the thought that I might have done right by any one of them.

Is that what love looks like?

Or is love a sixteen-year-old girl who walks away from her baby because of some deeply rooted instinct to enable him to have a better life than she herself has had, than she herself could ever hope to provide?

When I told a family member that I was pregnant at age 35, unmarried, he suggested that I give my son to “a real family”. Here is my son on a mountain in New Mexico. Love has many faces in my life. This is one of them.